Remembering the Holocaust, looking forward

The Hebrew press joins with Israelis across the country to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and commemorate the six million Jews who perished in Europe under Nazi rule, 70 years after World War II came to an end.

“Alive in our hearts,” Yedioth Ahronoth‘s main headline reads, in solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust. A small yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” written upon it adorns the top of the front page as well, and memorial poems are spread throughout the paper’s inner pages.

In Israel Hayom, the front page is dominated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fiery anti-Iran speech during last night’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem museum. “Even if we are forced to stand alone, we will not falter,” the paper quotes the Israeli leader in big, bold letters. Dror Eydar, one of the daily’s leading analysts, discusses President Reuven Rivlin’s speech at the Yad Vashem ceremony, asserting that the latter was correct in stressing that the State of Israel was established not because of the Holocaust, but on its own merit. “Never has the tie between our nation and this country been broken,” Eydar writes. “Jews have always lived here and the during past hundreds of years, the return home began.”

Haaretz leads with a large photograph of Holocaust survivor Dov Shimoni lighting a torch at the Yad Vashem museum in memory of the six million victims. The paper’s main page does not make any further mention of the Holocaust.

Back in Yedioth Ahronoth, Noah Kliger, the paper’s correspondent to the March of the Living in Poland’s Auschwitz death camp and a Holocaust survivor himself, gives a first-person account of his experiences throughout the war, going on to detail his feelings today upon returning to the land soaked in so much Jewish blood. “The sole dream of all the Jewish prisoners in the camps was to live one more day than Adolf Hitler and to survive the terrible Reich he had established,” Kliger recalls. “In past years there was a group of about twenty Holocaust survivors at the march, today only about half a dozen are left.”

In Israel Hayom, writer Dan Margalit decries the sentiment among certain critics of Israel who compare the Holocaust to the Palestinian Nakba. “Radical Palestinian propagandists and anti-Semitic Christians have striven for decades to connect the Holocaust of the Jews to the Nakba that befell the Arabs of Israel,” Margalit says. “There is no place for comparison. The leadership of the Arabs of Israel, who supported the Nazis in real time, brought the disaster upon themselves,” he asserts decisively.

In more current news affairs, Haaretz writer Revital Hovel reports on a landmark High Court of Justice ruling which determines that human rights organizations calling for sanctions or boycotts of Israel may be subject to fines over their stances. The court said that while the decision would in essence curb the right of the organizations to free speech, the restraint on such a right was “proportionate” and was necessary in order to protect the interests of the state of Israel.

Yedioth offers an exclusive report on new Israeli technology which aims to thwart any underground terrorist attacks from the Gaza Strip. The technology, deemed by the paper as the “Iron Dome of the subterranean threat,” would help locate potential attack tunnels constructed by Gaza-based terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. The government is expected to vote on funding for the project in the coming weeks, after which the advanced system will be placed around the Gaza Strip security fence.

Finally, Yedioth reports on an accident at the Ramat Gan Safari, where a baby kangaroo managed to escape his mother’s pouch and thus was in immediate threat of starving. The Safari staff was forced to use industrial tape, no less, in order to assure that the baby would not fall out of its mother’s pouch again. In two months’ time, the baby is expected to be strong enough to leave the pouch once again and survive on its own in the Safari.